Beach House plays with Vampire Weekend at the Fillmore October 13

Much like boarded-up buildings near the shore, Beach House songs offer a lot to unpack on first encounter. Each unforgettable, eerie melody is stretched out with drowsy fluidity by singer and organist Victoria Legrand. But just like any abandoned beach home, numerous dark, dusty corners and echoes abound. It's music covered in cobwebs.

Unsurprisingly, Legrand's lyrical meaning seems eternally out of reach — evoking a wealth of emotions without ever being specific. Take "Heart of Chambers," in which she sings "In that nook I found you/So old and tired/Would you be the one to carry me?" It's up to the listener to break into impersonal lines such as those and make them personal. And for that reason, increasing numbers adore this band. Inhabiting a Beach House song can be thrilling or, for some who need more immediate auditory gratification, frustrating.

So the band has its work cut out when opening for the relentlessly upbeat Vampire Weekend's all-ages crowd — its youngest audience yet. Still, Legrand and Alex Scally, Beach House's musical backbone, haven't made any changes to their musical mood or performance style.

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"So far, it seems like some people have heard of us and are excited to see us. To other people, it probably appears really boring because we're not jumping around, and our style — the point of it — is not to please any crowds," Scally says by phone early in the tour. "It kind of seems depressing in comparison to Vampire Weekend. But I like that. I like that we may be making some people think about something other than how fun life is."

Depressing isn't really the word for any of Beach House's three albums, the latest of which is Teen Dream, released this past January on Sub Pop. But everything does seem rather sepia-toned. Legrand's husky voice often recalls the late, great Nico, another striking, slightly distant frontwoman who often sang about remembering and re-examining past choices. The compositions' structures and moodiness recall power-pop legend Alex Chilton's slower moments, with far-out textures mirroring great '80s 4AD acts such as the Cocteau Twins — but less shrill and slightly more grounded in reality.

To that sketch of name-checks, Scally would probably politely demur. He prefers to avoid specifics. "People are welcome to feel whatever they want," he says. "We purposely design our music to be abstract. We want it to be open; we want it to be free. We don't want it to be a specific experience, just whatever happens naturally."

To him, Beach House is a pop band at its core: "We do definitely love the aesthetic of pop music: the choruses, the supercatchy melodies, going back to the '50s and '60s when things became so clearly pop."

So what if pop, in the new millennium, is a term rarely associated with Beach House's tempo of choice, which rarely raises above a steady plod. The narcotized pace of Teen Dream (and 2008's Devotion and 2006's self-titled debut) is all a function of best expressing melody, says Scally. "You can hear everything when something's slow. You can hear all the notes. You can hear everything blending together," he explains. "It's not just a blitz of sound. Everything is really meticulous."

If depressing doesn't accurately describe the band's music, meticulous certainly does. Building on Scally and Legrand's love of early pop, there is a heavy dose of Brill Building-esque production on Teen Dream. Instruments and vocals are layered for a near-orchestral effect, with powerful blasts of organ throughout. Gone is much of the near-exaggerated reverb used on the band's previous records, and any "lo-fi" descriptors from the past are now completely inaccurate. Teen Dream is a ripe kernel bursting with the band's sweeping vision, a sort of timeless, subgenre-less take on haunting pop. In spite of the title, Scally clarifies the record is not wrapped in nostalgia.

"I don't think it was really nostalgic for us. For us, it's a very, very forward-looking record," he says. "Maybe, if anything, it's a call to go back and explore the feelings you had when you were a teenager. But not in a reminiscing way. It's more about reinvigorating yourself, feeling passionate about things."

But if Scally and Legrand are purposely coy about subject matter and content, they are exacting about form. "We're very, very controlling about how the music is made and how it sounds. We write very, very specific arrangements and every sort of detail," he says. "Our previous records were kind of made in a lo-fi way because we didn't have any time or money. We just kind of jumped right in and recorded them as fast as possible. But with this record, we did have time, so we were able to concentrate on each sound and record it just the way we wanted it."

Luckily for fans of that result, the band aims to reproduce it faithfully in its live shows. For proof, check its recent iTunes Sessions live EP. Those six tracks sound as lovely as the studio recordings. And this is a point of pride for Scally. "We try to sound exactly like that. It's bigger, because it's a much bigger sound system, but we try to preserve the arrangements as much as we can," he says. To that end, he and Legrand will be joined live onstage in Miami by Dan Franz, who drummed on Teen Dream, as well as a second touring organist.